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The Organic Profit: Rodale and the Making of Marketplace Environmentalism
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419 pages6 hours
Summary
From green-lifestyle mavens who endorse products on social media to natural health activists sponsored by organic food companies, the marketplace for advice about how to live life naturally is better stocked than ever. Where did the curious idea of buying one s way to sustainability come from?
In no small part, as Andrew Case shows, the answer lies in the story of entrepreneur and reformer J. I. Rodale, his son Robert Rodale, and their company, the Rodale Press. These pioneers of organic gardening were also pioneers in cultivating a niche for natural health products in the 1950s, organizing the emerging marketplace for organic foods in the 1960s, and publishing an endless supply of advice books on diet and health in the process.
Rodale s marketplace environmentalism brought environmentally minded consumers together and taught Americans how to grow food, eat, and live in more environmentally friendly ways. Yet the marketplace has proved more effective at addressing individual health concerns than creating public health interventions. It is as liable to champion untested and ineffectual health supplements as it is to challenge the indiscriminant use of dangerous pesticides. For anyone trying to make sense of the complex tensions between business profits and the desire for environmental reform, The Organic Profit is essential reading.
Publisher: University of Washington PressReleased: Mar 6, 2018ISBN: 9780295743028Format: book
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The Organic Profit - Andrew N. Case
WEYERHAEUSER ENVIRONMENTAL BOOKS
Paul S. Sutter, Editor
WEYERHAEUSER ENVIRONMENTAL BOOKS explore human relationships with natural environments in all their variety and complexity. They seek to cast new light on the ways that natural systems affect human communities, the ways that people affect the environments of which they are a part, and the ways that different cultural conceptions of nature profoundly shape our sense of the world around us. A complete list of the books in the series appears at the end of this book.
THE ORGANIC PROFIT
Rodale and the Making of Marketplace Environmentalism
ANDREW N. CASE
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
Seattle
The Organic Profit is published with the assistance of a grant from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Endowment, established by the Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation, members of the Weyerhaeuser family, and Janet and Jack Creighton.
Copyright © 2018 by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of America
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University of Washington Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Case, Andrew N., author.
Title: The organic profit : Rodale and the making of marketplace environmentalism / Andrew N. Case.
Description: 1st Edition. | Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2018] | Series: Weyerhaeuser environmental books | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026612 (print) | LCCN 2017051724 (ebook) | ISBN 9780295743028 (ebook) | ISBN 9780295743011 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Rodale (Firm)—History. | Rodale, J. I. (Jerome Irving), 1898–1971. | Organic gardening—United States—History. | Physical fitness—United States—History.
Classification: LCC SB453.5 (ebook) | LCC SB453.5 .C36 2018 (print) | DDC 338.7/6107050973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026612
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. ∞
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
The Organic Citizen Consumer
PAUL S. SUTTER
For most of American history, all agriculture was organic. Farmers did not use chemical pesticides, and those who chose to maintain the fertility of their soils did so by laboriously returning plant, animal, and human wastes to them, and by planting leguminous cover crops that could fix atmospheric nitrogen. That began to change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as farmers, gardeners, and orchardists turned to arsenical compounds to control pests, and as they sought out concentrated sources of the essential chemical elements of soil fertility—nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous in particular—to alleviate the labor demands of traditional soil husbandry. Nonetheless, as late as the 1930s, it made little sense to distinguish an American agriculture that was organic from one that was not. Indeed, the dominant environmental critique of American agriculture during the New Deal era was one of frontier wastefulness and impermanence—of Americans skimming the land of its fertility and moving on—not of Americans polluting the land, and themselves, with synthetic chemicals. Before World War II, permanent agriculture,
not organic agriculture,
was the rallying cry of environmentally minded reformers.
So how did the organic,
once the unexamined rule of American agriculture, quickly become the reformist exception? The answer lies largely in the profound changes in American agricultural production during the middle decades of the twentieth century, and in an acute sense after World War II that our food system was dangerously hooked on industrially produced fertilizers, a new generation of powerful pesticides, and a panoply of artificial additives in the processed foods we ate. The modern organic movement was forged in this crucible of chemical concern, and consumers were critical to its success. In fact, one could argue that the rise of a robust market for organic products has been one of the great success stories of politicized consumer activism in postwar American history. But there is another side to this story, another explanation for the rapid rise of the organic
: during the last decades of the twentieth century, consumer markets fragmented as Americans searched for products, and even entire lifestyles, that could differentiate them from the masses. In this context, organic
became a signifier of an elite consumer status: to buy organic was to express in the consumer marketplace one’s privileged affinity for nature and natural living. Seen this way, the organic
movement seems more a marketing success story than a triumph of environmental politics and popular reform.
No one had more to do with the rise of the organic
ideal in the United States and the movement that would bring it into the consumer mainstream than did the Rodales—the idiosyncratic Jerome I. Rodale and his son, Robert. After establishing a modestly successful electrical manufacturing business and dabbling in publishing, Jerome Rodale bought a farm in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, in 1942 and simultaneously launched a new magazine, Organic Farming and Gardening, designed to be the mouthpiece of his burgeoning organic crusade. Rodale did not invent the organic ideal; he was influenced by the British agricultural reformer Sir Albert Howard, and by the various American back-to-the-land advocates of the interwar years. Still, Jerome and, later, Robert Rodale outshined all others in their efforts to champion and popularize it. Jerome Rodale initially focused his critique on artificial fertilizers and his sense that these denatured chemical additives impoverished the soil and the health of those who consumed its products. His organic crusade thus began as a gospel of compost, a prophecy that the organic health of the soil was critical to personal health. But as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, and as Robert joined his father in advocacy, the Rodales increasingly critiqued chemical pesticides as well. In doing so, the Rodales made a connection that would be critical to postwar environmentalism: that bodies and environments were intimately linked, and that fears for one’s personal health could be powerful motivators for supporting environmental protection. As such, one could make a strong case that the Rodales ought to be much more prominent figures in the American environmental pantheon.
Andrew Case makes just such an argument in The Organic Profit, his fascinating cultural and environmental history of the Rodales and their publishing enterprises. But this is much more than a book about the origins of organic agriculture. Case is, in fact, more interested in the marketing side of the story, in how the Rodales organized and mobilized consumers to embrace the organic ideal for both reformist and lifestyle reasons. Case asks a series of questions about the relationship between business, consumerism, and environmental activism that could not be more relevant to us today. While the Rodales were principled leaders of the organic agriculture movement in the United States, they were also businessmen who sought to make money from their organic crusade and thus progenitors of today’s organic marketplace. How, Case asks, do we make sense of the Rodales as prophets who sought to make profits? How do we assess an environmental movement that took corporate form? And what were the implications of anchoring efforts at systemic agricultural reform in a consumer movement that prized personal health and self-improvement?
Case convincingly argues that those Americans who responded to, and reshaped, the Rodale message, which cascaded forth in a steady stream of postwar publications, did so as both activists and as consumers. Case is no starry-eyed proponent of the power of green capitalism to change the world, and he can be incisively critical of consumerism as a path to meaningful environmental change. But he nonetheless insists that we have missed an important part of the story of the modern environmental movement by too quickly assuming that business and environmentalism are necessarily oppositional forces and that green consumerism is merely therapeutic escapism. As this history of the Rodales and their readers reveals, what Case aptly calls marketplace environmentalism
is a much richer phenomenon.
While the Rodales hoped that they could directly influence modern agricultural production with their organic message—and Case suggests that they ultimately did with the sweeping if deeply compromised Organic Foods Production Act in 1990, which established the federal organic
standards that we live with today—the more important part of their story is how they worked with and through consumers to push for reforms to the food system. As the Rodales built a publishing business, they forged an organic community not of alternative farmers but of health-conscious consumers. In building that community, the Rodales were not simply purveyors of information, and their readers were not merely passive consumers of it. Rodale publications—which included not only various iterations on Organic Farming and Gardening but also the company’s more successful health magazine, Prevention—were forums in which readers could share their personal experiences, and the Rodales themselves constantly calibrated their message based on these interactions with readers.
As a result, the Rodales built a social movement by—to use the old saw of second-wave feminism—making the personal political. They pulled together and politicized a group of readers who initially experienced their anxieties about the postwar American food system in their bodies, their homes, and their gardens. For example, readers largely drove the growing alarm in Rodale publications about powerful pesticides and their potential health and environmental effects, preparing the seedbed for the sweeping critique of pesticides that Rachel Carson offered in Silent Spring. By highlighting the innovative organizational role played by the Rodales and their publications, Case gives to us a dynamic and politicized variant on green consumerism, one in which a business gave birth to an activist community. When readers subscribed to Rodale publications, or bought the carefully curated assortment of natural products advertised therein, they were not just making themselves feel better or defining themselves as particular kinds of consumers—they were also getting a purchase on political power.
Nonetheless, as Case brilliantly shows, the Rodale model for mobilizing citizen consumers had profound tensions at its core. Unlike most leaders of the postwar environmental movement, the Rodales were not scientific experts. They were aggregators and collators of the experiential and anecdotal who empowered consumer feelings and preferences and sowed a deep suspicion of expertise among their readership. Postwar American consumers had a right to be suspicious of experts at a moment when some of the most powerful products of modern science and medicine seemed to threaten human and environmental health. Indeed, environmentalism as a social movement thrived on a healthy skepticism of this powerful postwar scientific consensus. But the Rodales empowered the impressionistic and the speculative in troubling ways, they showed only modest interest in scientific evidence or rigorous experimentation to support their organic prescriptions, and, in the process, they edged too easily into therapeutic quackery.
The consumer marketplace, it turns out, can be a poor arbiter of quality, of what is true and what is effective, and therein lies one of the most powerful lessons of The Organic Profit: that marketplace environmentalism is as capable of producing conspiratorial anti-vaccine activism or championing unproven and ineffectual health supplements as it is of challenging the indiscriminate use of dangerous pesticides or transforming the American food system. It is not that the consumer marketplace is structurally incapable of producing meaningful political activism. The Rodale story contains important examples to the contrary, as Case clearly demonstrates. Rather, the central lesson of The Organic Profit is that marketplace environmentalism—with its tensions between prophecy and profit, universal scientific truth and individual consumer experience, the public world of political engagement and the private world of self-improvement—is as mercurial as it is full of potential.
In the end, Andrew Case wisely resists giving us either of the two stories that we might expect from a study of the Rodales: a triumphant narrative of heroic prophets moving the organic ideal from the fringes to the mainstream, or a declensionist narrative in which a business enterprise profits from encouraging banal consumer self-realization. Instead, Case insists that the Rodales gave us something messier and more profound: a marketplace environmentalism in which business leaders and citizen consumers together built an organic community as capable of achieving political reform as it was susceptible to misguided therapeutic nostrums. The Rodales and their publications, by launching both an organic movement and an organic marketplace, tried to convince Americans that improving themselves and improving the world could be complementary activities. The Organic Profit is an admirably critical engagement with that project that, paradoxically, may help to redeem it in the end.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book exists due to the generosity of a number of colleagues, scholars, as well as friends and family. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I had the good fortune of working with Bill Cronon, whose inexhaustible kindness has been a model for me as a teacher, scholar, and citizen. Bill saw the potential for this project from the beginning, and although a reader will not find Bill cited anywhere, it is safe to say his ideas and influence run through every one of these pages. Likewise, Nan Enstad’s enthusiasm and insights into cultural history were crucial to this project. From its earliest incarnation as a thesis about the fluoridation, Gregg Mitman has been generous with his guidance, feedback, and friendship. I would like to thank Susan Lederer and the late James Baughman for their contributions as well.
At the University of Washington Press, Marianne Keddington-Lang was an early champion of this project, and Regan Huff and Catherine Cocks helped steer the manuscript toward completion. Paul Sutter’s comments and kind encouragement have been invaluable—this book is far clearer and more compelling as a result of his efforts. Thank you as well to two outside readers and their much-needed critiques. The research at the core of this book could not have been completed without the assistance of staff members of the Rodale company, particularly Mark Kintzel. Thank you as well to Carlton Jackson, who wrote the first book on J. I. Rodale that J. I. did not write himself.
I am immensely proud to call this book a product of the Center for Culture, History, and Environment at UW–Madison. Over the years I enjoyed many great conversations (and afternoon jams) with Andrew Stuhl, Rob Emmett, Mitch Aso, Brian Hamilton, Kellen Backer, Alex Nading, Rachel Gross, and many more. Conversations—and ongoing friendships—with Todd Dresser, Kendra Howard, Amrys Williams, and Anna Zeide were also formative to this project. Thanks also to Crystal Marie Moten, Jennifer Holland, Libby Tronnes, Charles Hughes, Doug Kiel, and Megan Raby for tackling the draftiest of drafts.
Various parts of this book have been presented to audiences both large and small. Panels at the American Society for Environmental History, the Association for the History of Medicine, the Business History Association, and many others were central to the development of this project. I would also like to thank Roger Horowitz and the Hagley Library’s Research Seminar for a fruitful conversation about my work. Likewise, thanks to everyone over the years who has asked a kind (or even an unkind) question about this book or shared a story about their own garden or told me about a family member who used to clip articles from Prevention.
There are many friends both near and far who deserve thanks as well. I miss not being able to walk two blocks to visit Vanessa and Adi Walker-Gordon, but I have happily followed them to Haifa, New Orleans, Cincinnati, and Amherst to enjoy their company. Danny and Jillian Festa remain good friends I wish I could see all the time. Abby Neely helped me confirm that tea and fig bars are the secret ingredients to writing, and that friends, roasted vegetables, and bourbon create a balanced approach to scholarly life. Family dinners with Abby, Todd, and Amrys on Mifflin Street will always be fond memories. Aaron Ruesch used to listen to me ramble about fluoride and organic food, and still humors me in some of my digressions. It is not entirely accidental that I chose to write a book that took me back to Pennsylvania, if only for a brief time. While they are not sure what I was doing in college all those years, Rob Hain, Jerry Hain, and Marthe Chensel make it a pleasure to come back home.
Over many years my family has provided gentle encouragement even when I would have rather not talked about how that book was going.
Thanks to my sister, Sarah Reigel, and her family. My mother, Shahan McCracken, might not admit it, but she once owned a copy of Stocking Up, so she bears some responsibility for inspiring this book. She and George McCracken have been unfailing in their support, and I love them for it. I am also immensely grateful to my grandmother Stella McIntyre for her example of a life well lived. Thanks also to my extended family—Jim and Cathy Sommerfeld, Lisa and Carl Schultz, and Rod and Cathy Case.
This book and so much more would not be a reality without my wife, Amanda Sommerfeld. Amanda has lived with the ideas in this book over many meals and during many miles on trail. Her relentless pursuit of a more equitable world, her love for life, her love for learning, and her patience have inspired me to get behind the mule
on many days when I would have rather not. We might struggle to keep plants alive in our own garden, but we have cultivated a life together and started growing a family of our own with the addition of our wondrous daughter, Lena. With buckets of love and gratitude, this book is dedicated to them.
NOTE TO READERS
Readers should know that in researching and writing this history, several barriers limited what this book could and could not uncover. The unpublished papers of J. I. and Robert Rodale and the archives of the Rodale company are not currently available to the public, but I was given an unprecedented amount of access with the help of Rodale staff and associates of the Rodale family. The papers of both J. I. and Robert are housed in a private family archive in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, but they were not cataloged, which made finding correspondence and specific materials a considerable challenge. I was unable to use this archive freely, but boxes of materials that J. I. Rodale had collected for his own autobiography, the company’s extensive clippings files, documents from the firm’s Federal Trade Commission trial, its pamphlet collection, and its remarkable in-house library were made available to me. Because detailed information about subscribers and the company’s finances were not made available, any financial details described here comes from published accounts. Readers should also know that at no point have I asked for or received any funding for this research from the Rodale family or the Rodale company nor have they asked to review any of the research or writing for this book. The company has generously permitted republication of the images in this book.
THE ORGANIC PROFIT
INTRODUCTION
BACK TO THE GARDEN, THROUGH THE MARKET
ON A WARM EVENING IN NEW YORK CITY IN JUNE 1971, J. I. RODALE sweated nervously as he waited to go on stage. The seventy-two-year-old was no stranger to the streets of Manhattan, but this experience was something new. Rodale was about to be a guest on Dick Cavett’s television show; he was stepping into the bright lights after years of waiting in the wings. He had been invited on the show because he had just been featured in a cover story of the New York Times Magazine, and because the subjects he had spent the last thirty years promoting—natural health, organic food, and farming—were making headlines across the country in the early 1970s.
With his bushy beard and dark glasses, the slight-statured and neatly dressed Rodale was sharp-witted, self-deprecating, and idiosyncratic. He was, for the lack of a better term, a character. He could talk a blue streak about what sugar did to the mind and what natural food could do for the health of the body. He made acerbic claims about what doctors thought of his ideas and declared he had been ahead of the times in writing about the dangers of chemicals in food and medicine. Since he began writing and publishing in the 1930s, he had churned out books about matters like the merits of hawthorne berries and self-financed a theater company to produce his own allegorical plays about good health. All the while, he maintained a wry sense of humor that gave away his ethnic roots in the Jewish enclave of New York’s Lower East Side.
Jerome Irving (J. I.) Rodale (1898–1971), n.d. Courtesy of the Rodale Family Archives.
In print, as on television, J. I. Rodale could happily play the charming health nut, but his work was also serious business. Since the 1940s his company, the Rodale Press, had produced the magazines Organic Gardening and Farming and Prevention as well as scores of books about natural methods of gardening and health. Even as he made wisecracks, Rodale also called attention to the potential hazards of artificial chemicals that were seeping into daily life in the decades after 1945. Scrutinizing the safety of fertilizers and pesticides, Rodale questioned how these substances might be accreting in plants, foods, bodies, and the broader environment. He did not simply ring alarm bells; he told his readers how to protect themselves, and how to change their lives by gardening, eating, and living more naturally. Remarkably, Rodale began writing about the hazards of synthetic chemicals two decades before these issues entered the national spotlight with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the emergence of the environmental movement in the 1960s.
Yet J. I. Rodale would have been hard to peg as part of the environmental vanguard of the Earth Day generation. Not only had he grown up in the tenements of New York City, but he lacked any education or training in farming or ecology and had only a layperson’s education in scientific matters. Before he became a publisher and natural health guru,
he was an electrical parts manufacturer who ran a company that made products like lamps, switches, and fuses. He was more comfortable as a man of business than as a man of the great outdoors. He did not crusade for wild spaces or fight to protect ecosystems, but instead worked to change the more personal landscapes of the body through eating and health practices. Whether by consuming vitamins and supplements or by developing habits that safeguarded the body from chemicals, he argued that natural methods were the path toward a better version of the self.
J. I. Rodale also stands out from other leading environmental figures because his passion also produced a corporate enterprise. Unlike many environmental reformers, his mission to make modern life more natural was fundamentally a commercial one. He and his publishing company cultivated a niche for natural health products in the 1950s, helped organize the emerging marketplace for organic foods in the 1960s, and produced an endless supply of advice books on diet and health in the process. That mission was taken up and expanded by J. I. Rodale’s son, Robert, who would lead the family publishing company through its remarkable growth and expansion into a media powerhouse in the 1970s and 1980s. Over the years, the publications of the Rodale Press created a space where natural health ideas and natural products could find one another, and where reforming the environment began at the checkout counter. That distinct legacy of advocacy and profitability remains today. Still led by Rodale’s heirs, the firm supports a nonprofit institute that serves as a hub for research in sustainable food systems. At the same time, the company grosses over $500 million each year with magazines like Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Runner’s World, Prevention, the venerable Organic Gardening, and a still-unending supply of advice books that teach consumers how to feel better, live longer, and how to make their homes and their bodies more natural.¹
Looking back from our own time in the early twenty-first century, when it is a popular aphorism of the green
economy that a company should make a profit while also helping the environment, it can be hard to recognize just how far out of the mainstream the Rodales once were. The type of consumer-centered advice that used to fill the columns of Rodale magazines in the 1950s and 1960s today packs books, blogs, and websites that instruct Americans in how to clean their homes, freshen their breath, and live their lives without relying on artificial chemicals. Moreover, just as Rodale magazines were once filled with ads for natural supplements and compost kits, today’s green
consumer media is fused with an array of products. From green-lifestyle mavens who endorse products for their followers on social media to natural health activists sponsored by organic food companies, the marketplace for advice about what to do and what to buy to make your life more natural is more abundant than ever.
My guess is that this landscape—the consumer one—is one most readers have experienced—after all, this landscape is where many Americans today most often find themselves making choices that reflect their environmental values and their health concerns. What foods to eat, what type of personal care products to buy, what type of lives to live are increasingly how those of us in the more privileged corners of the world choose to enact our values, including our environmental values. In this way, on top of alerting us to the merits of compost and the evils of white sugar, the Rodales are timely guides for understanding the green marketplace that surrounds us today. Ultimately, the story of J. I. Rodale, Robert Rodale, and the company that bears their name demonstrates how far green
entrepreneurs and consumers have come over the decades, as well as the limits of the marketplace as an agent of systematic environmental reform.
The Rodale story helps us make more sense of the green consumerism and green businesses of our time, but it also helps widen the scope we use to understand the environmental movement’s history. For some time now scholars have been working to show that environmentalism’s history in postwar America should not be limited just to those activists and scientists who fought to protect wild lands and natural resources.² Scholars now frequently point to a range of environmentalisms
that emerged from varying political and social groups as well as a range of different environmental concerns. Indeed, to speak of environmentalism as a movement sparked solely by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or a single turning point like a particular oil spill or Earth Day 1970 is now passé among scholars. Yet there is still more work to be done in expanding our understanding of environmentalism and its complexities. Toward that end, the story of the Rodales and their readers helps further incorporate other figures, other concerns, and other avenues for reform into the stories we tell about environmentalism’s emergence. The publication and public reaction to Silent Spring was undoubtedly a pivotal moment. But Carson and the debate over synthetic chemicals did not come from nowhere. The Rodale story provides some important context to where consumer concerns about chemicals came from and at the same time puts a focus on how both commerce and sometimes-questionable personal health anxieties shaped environmental sentiments in the postwar years. Environmentalism undoubtedly relied on the insights of ecological science, but as in the marketplace it often elevated personal experience over scientific evidence. The Rodales—as well their devoted army of composters and natural health enthusiasts—help us add a vital yet often neglected layer to the fuller picture of the multiple and often conflicted ways environmentalism emerged in postwar America.
But the case made by this book is not simply that we should add the Rodale company’s logo to environmentalism’s Hall of Fame.
We also need to take seriously the type of environmentalism the Rodales promoted and explore it as a site of critical inquiry. Although environmental historians have long argued that consumer society explains the emergence of environmentalism in the postwar era, a focus on social movements and political action has often obscured how the consumer marketplace served as a site of environmental thought and action. Likewise, historians have generally depicted businesses as foils to environmentalism. Following the Rodales and their company over the decades reveals how they, along with their readers, crafted a marketplace environmentalism that provided an open space for critiquing material ecology, contesting scientific and medical understandings of health and the environment, and creating personal styles of living that reflected changing environmental values.³ Marketplace environmentalism did not emerge solely from a business or a group of consumers, but instead from those two entities working in tandem. The Rodale story demonstrates that the marketplace—created by a firm and its consumers—was not a sideshow to the real
environmental reform of social and political movements, but a site where Americans navigated the changing ecology of daily life in the postwar decades. To fold the marketplace into our understanding of environmentalism’s past requires taking seriously the types of ideas, products, and practices that circulated through Rodale’s commercial universe as places of environmental thought and action.
Of course, taking that marketplace seriously does not mean ignoring its faults. The Rodale Press deserves credit for giving a voice to little old ladies in tennis shoes,
whose concerns were often disregarded by medical and scientific experts. But the company’s publications also fostered a popular marketplace of ideas, products, and personalities that frequently strained credulity. The great virtue of marketplace environmentalism, for both businesses and consumers, was that it did not require a PhD or peer-reviewed results to gain entry. Yet that virtue also proved to be its vice. If the Rodales helped make compost bins and organic foods part of daily life for those concerned about the environment, they also helped make an ocean of nutritional advice and waves of diet regimens and lifestyle choices of questionable
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